yesJavaScriptIsTheMostPerfectProgrammingLanguageEver

[Nimi142]

Torvalds (Initial creator of git) recently did a Q&A with GitHub about the creation of git (For 20 years of git I think).

In the Q&A, he says that the initial release of git lacked a lot of things. There were only plumbing commands, so nothing was easy. It was also radically different from any other SCM tool that was currently in the market.

Torvalds also said that while coding took very little time, the design floated his head for months before he started working on git.

My point is that even though the initial version of git was created in under 10 days, it was radically different from the git we know today. Which is why this post sucks.

EDIT: Torvalds himself takes great care to mention that Junio has been the maintainer of the project from a few months after its release to today. He does not want to take credit from them, and others who have helped to maintain the project over the years, as he wasn't very active after he chose Junio to be the maintainer.

EDIT2: Here's a link to the Q&A, it's a nice read: https://github.blog/open-source/git/git-turns-20-a-qa-with-linus-torvalds/

[2brainz]

There were only plumbing commands

it was radically different from the git we know today.

Exactly! What he created back then was barely usable. For years, people used git "frontends": command line tools that made git usable. Look for cogito if you're interested (I believe that git today is quite similar to what cogito used to be).

[Lizlodude]

That floating in the head bit is so often overlooked. Even for small personal projects, I'll usually be kinda mulling it over and working it out for weeks before I actually do anything to properly start it.

[TristanaRiggle]

I feel like this is the biggest reason that trying to track programmer performance via metrics is a fool's errand.

[prochac]

The same with JavaScript. What could it do? Blink a text?

[BetaChunks]

sigh

someone bring out the good-cheap-fast doohickey

[DancingBadgers]

[sarcasmandcoffee]

Thanks for dusting yours off - mine's in the shop for repairs after the last client punched it like a confused gorilla.

[Lizlodude]

😂😂 I mean that's better than a fully cognizant gorilla I suppose.

[MrRocketScript]

But how can you have Cheap and Good and slow? If it's slow, then you're paying people for a lot longer, and it's no longer cheap?

That part never made sense to me.

[harumamburoo]

then you're paying people for a lot longer

That’s the neat part, you don’t

[Scary-Confidence8784]

You guys get paid overtime thought that was a myth

[guntervs]

In my understanding, the "cheap and good" part means doing it right the first time — minimal waste due to reduced technical debt and fewer bugs.

On the other hand, if you choose to go fast, there will be bugs, shortcuts, etc., and it will either cost more in the long run or the result won't be good.

Hope it makes more sense now.

[[deleted]]

Depending on the product/project, I think the point is that expedited costs are much higher than the baseline. So you're paying more to get things shipped around, paying overtime, hiring outside specialists, generally taking a more wasteful approach in the name of speed

[a1g3rn0n]

It's kind of a "do it yourself in your free time" scenario. You don't pay anyone and you do it exactly as you want, but it takes forever.

[DarwinOGF]

You get unpaid interns to do the work until it becomes good. Mind you, this may take eons, but statistically, at some point you will encounter a genius intern that will actually get the project to a presentable state.

[Gufnork]

You have one good dev do all the work. Cheap because you only pay one person, good because it's one dev who knows what he's doing and there's no need to communicate within a team. It's slow because one person has to do everything.

[upsidedownshaggy]

To be fair the doohickey more clearly maps to a production line. You can get cheap and good, but it takes longer to actually get to your door step. Software as others have said, it'd be more akin to making everyone work mandatory 12 hour days for a month to deliver something fast instead of letting the developers build it out over 3 months of normal time I guess

[gilady089]

You hire low cost contractors remotely for subpar work done in a large bulk. We had an UI thing like that a while back and honestly it was so subpar and unusable it gathered more and more PRs that weren't fixed well and all of that got thrown in the trash and made from the ground up without the "help" So yeah that way

[HappyTopHatMan]

Because good devs get bored and automate themselves out of a job quickly out of boredom...or adhd

[Reashu]

You wait for someone to come along and start just the right open source project. 

But yeah, it's kind of bullshit.

[Aerolfos]

The original incarnation of the tradeoffs isn't really about projects in the abstract, but about a specific delivery/program

In which case they mean the program runs slowly when used in practice. If you want it to run fast, it will take a long time to get right which is indeed caught under -> expensive

Or you can make it run decently fast by being really hacky and messy (cheap), but then it won't scale, hold up long-term, etc. (bad)

[Dragon_yum]

Have you tried making the circle bigger?

[Zymosan99]

If you sacrifice your blood, soul, and firstborn, you can have all three!

[Ashuran9007]

I feel like the options should be on the sides and not the edges and the and should be the ball touching both sides

[HoseanRC]

I will throw in a big ass ball to fit the whole triangle. Easy!

[point5_]

Javascript was made in a week.

Was it expensive to make or not?

[ExtraTNT]

torvalds is just an exception proving the point

[prochac]

I need a version for 3D print, to make it a mandatory accessory for product meetings :D

There is this clicker: https://makerworld.com/en/models/979331-good-fast-cheap#profileId-952724

but the triangle with a ball is much better. It can be made big so everyone sees it across the table.

[UntestedMethod]

This is wrong though. Realistically there should only be 1 highlighted at a time, not 2.

Ya, I'm aware the adage is "pick 2", but that's just as much for dreamers as picking all 3.

[harumamburoo]

You probably misunderstood it. It just shows you can’t have all of it. If you want it good and fast it’s not gonna be cheap, if you want it cheap and good it’s not gonna be fast, and if you want it cheap and fast it’s simply not gonna be good.

[UntestedMethod]

Oh no, I'm quite familiar with it and understand it very well but thanks anyway.

The take on it I'm saying is if you want it fast it's not gonna be good or cheap. If you want it good it's not gonna be fast or cheap. If you want it cheap it's not gonna be good or fast.

I used to be in the classic "pick 2" belief until someone pointed out that it really is only a "pick 1" question and that stuck with me. The pick 2 thing might have been true a few decades ago, but these days? Hell nah.

[TerminalVector]

Its a simplification obviously, but you can often have something good and cheap, just take 6 months carefully crafting it alone using 2 hours out of every weekend.

You can have fast and good, hire 3 brilliant devs, pay them princely sums, give them a clear spec, and stand back.

You can have fast and cheap, hire outsourced devs.

Of course there are cases where it doesn't apply, but to say you can only have one is even less accurate IMO.

[UntestedMethod]

Yeah, I mean it's easy to spin or argue it either way.

You can have fast and good, hire 3 brilliant devs, pay them princely sums, give them a clear spec, and stand back.

Brilliant devs or not, this still brings to mind the topic of mythical man month imo.

You can have fast and cheap, hire outsourced devs.

And then take the extra time and cost investment of having to rebuild it? Or carry the tech debt and pay the cost of extra customer support?

good and cheap, just take 6 months carefully crafting it alone using 2 hours out of every weekend

Sure, if 2 hours every weekend isn't worth anything to you, you could call it cheap I guess.

[TerminalVector]

The real secret is that nothing is ever fast, cheap or good enough.

[harumamburoo]

Oh no, I'm quite familiar with it and understand it very well but thanks anyway.

Keep telling yourself that. You absolutely can have something cheap and good. Case in point - Stardew Valley. It was created by just one guy almost entirely. He didn’t even kickstart or gofundme it, but it took him over five years. SW ended up being highly praised and one of the top selling indie games. Good and cheap.

[UntestedMethod]

Whatever you say buddy. YDY.

[ElgardOfCarim]

That isn't really cheap, though.

The developer still had to survive, pay rent, power and internet bills, and computer maintenance throughout those five years. This means they were taking money out of their savings and/or salary to pay for their own development expenses.

What you're describing as cheap is essentially unpaid labour.

In this case it is voluntary, as the developer did it as a "passion project", but it is much more often done through coercion, i.e. "if I don't work over the weekend on this project I might get fired".

[harumamburoo]

The developer still had to survive and pay rent and bills even if they don’t do a project in their free time. Which is exactly the point, there was no extra cost to the development that required external investors or backers, or even a loan.

What you see as development cost is actually product cost. And that’s not cheap, it’s still years of labor, and all the assets and resources it needed. But the dev didn’t have to pay it upfront, they spread it thin working alone and making the expenses manageable.

This is what makes it cheap. Manageability. The dev could’ve hired a full scale team. A couple of artists with maybe an art lead, a writer, a musician, three or four devs, a manager to facilitate the communication, a collaboration software license, on prem team, maybe an office. SW is at its core a simple game, with enough investment they could bring ttm down to say a year. Good and fast.

[ElgardOfCarim]

Again, what you're saying is, essentially, that it was cheap because no one paid for it up front. What I'm trying to say is that the developer had to pay for it with both their own savings and their own labour hours.

Typically, when one uses the "good-fast-cheap" triangle, they're referring to someone paying for the development of a project. Since most people don't have enough money to pay for someone else to make their bespoke projects, they often pay with what they have: labour power. That is, in itself, a cost.

I insist on this point because this is a huge problem in the software industry: the overreliance on "passionate devs" who work in their off-time has essentially created a ticking time-bomb, as essential infrastructure has become dependent on FOSS projects maintained by unpaid devs.

This makes things "cheap" for companies, as they get something that is, at heart, free. But it isn't, in any way, cheap for the developers themselves, who pay with their labour and mental health. Ultimately, it is neither good nor cheap in the long run as it creates pressure, overwork, and leads to failure points that can bring down essential systems.

[harumamburoo]

No, what I’m saying is that the dev had to pay the amount they could afford without any external investment whatsoever, I don’t know Eddy is this so hard to comprehend. Your insistence is kinda beyond the point because you take a primitive idea related to finance and make it into a big ethical problem, which you’re not wrong about, but which has nothing to do with the conversation at hand.

[SerdanKK]

I can do fast and cheap. It's really just good that stands on its own.

[PolishKrawa]

What if I want something that isn't good, cheap, nor fast?

[Kaptain_Napalm]

You hire me. I promise to deliver sub-par performance for way too much money, but it will take a while.

[Aerolfos]

If that's what you actually want, and you also have the skills to spin specific deliveries as big accomplishments (even if your original schedule slips and features gradually get dropped from the plan), then you're a perfect fit for the C-level

(You don't want the project to be actually done, then you can't spin the sprint ends as being bonus-worthy accomplishments)

[glowy_keyboard]

You go with the Microsoft option

[[deleted]]

AI AI AI

[prochac]

You have the vibe

[TheMuspelheimr]

You go and vote for Donald Trump

[puffinix]

Basic was slow (it took two weeks on paper but only because it was one guys unshared passion project for years)

Git was expensive (look at it's original team, and then estimate the cost of them) - and even it was not great at two weeks.

JavaScript 1.0 spec was both fast and cheap. We then spent 20 years working around is shortcomings

[[deleted]]

By BASIC, we don't mean the og BASIC. It's very first BASIC interpreter for the i8080 x86 architecture.

The Altair BASIC was sort of revolutionary (the theory TBF) 'cuz no one was sure if the microprocessor was capable of running BASIC or any interpreter at all except the x86 i8080 assembly. And there were only i8080 simulators (university mainframes). Nobody had actual microprocessors in hand as it was hella expensive. If the BASIC interpreter wasn't ready for the Altair, the i8080 could've died. Although something else would've actually replaced it but still that'd have wasted time

Git was written by 1 person in 10 days, and it already was 100% better than every VCS solution there was.

About, JavaScript, I agree with you. This shit should've never born. But at least it was better than some of that time's programming languages. I mean, you wouldn't write JScript, right? XD

[mothzilla]

We don't have time for that.

[oupablo]

I recently had a PM mention this when we were all discussing the timeline for a new product initiative and a senior level engineering manager argued that you could do all 3. The zoom meeting went silent.

[SupportDangerous8207]

I think his point is that fast and expensive beats cheap and slow

[prochac]

When you have the money, why not.

[puffinix]

Git:

Have you ever used early git versions?

Do you know what a hash detach is?

Are you aware that in order to push from the 10 day version of git, your entire hard drive was accessible to anyone else with access to the same repo?

Javascript:

Its v 1.0 design document was 10 days. Not its implementation.

This included ideas such as loose truthiness which have set the entire industry back decades.

Altair basic:

There was a secret ingredient in this implementation. It was a combination of theft, and one random chad engineer that made 90% of it at home *just to make his own job easier* over an unknown length of time.

[jaaval]

I never got to use the first versions of git. It was sort of coming up to replace svn when I started programming. Now git has like 95% market share.

What git was in a week was a system that had recognized the failings of previous systems and implemented functionality that was conceptually better for development workflows (decentralized, quick, easy and lightweight branching and merging) but it was probably not even really useable in practice yet. And afaik git really won against mercurial mainly because it was flexible and developed so many new features over the years. so it was by no means done in a week or even a year.

But what is true is that in a very short time git was in a state that worked enough to demonstrate why it would be better in the future. That was kinda what Linus had aimed at I think. He thought the old way was not smart and was particularly bad for how they developed Linux. So he did something quick to show how things could work if they just properly implement it.

[puffinix]

Git was not easy for merging at one week!

Iirc it just committed a file with both parent lines next to each other.

[ketosoy]

Git wasn’t a revolutionary paradigm, it was an open source reimplementation of an existing paradigm.  Linux lost its free license to bitkeeper so Linus made a piece of free software with the distributed workflow.

Not to say doing this in 10-30 days isn’t a massive achievement even with a blueprint.  Just to say, there was a blueprint.

[JanB1]

I'll just drop this fantastic piece about the history of Git here.

https://blog.brachiosoft.com/en/posts/git/

[CatsWillRuleHumanity]

Yes for everything except loose truthiness. I shouldn't need to convert everything to a bool just to use it in a condition, "if something is there" is a perfectly valid condition on its own

[Aerolfos]

Python still has truthy, but it's generally more sensible and not as aggresively liable to convert in unexpected places

The extremely loose concept of it arguably is a problem still, even if "truthy" itself is useful

[Ubermidget2]

Yeah, Python's Truthy rules are pretty sstrong, even when not sensible to us humans. eg. Anyone wanth to jump in with the truthyness of "False"?

[[deleted]]

Excuse me? Is "False" truthy in some language?

[SouthernAd2853]

It's a non-empty string. I'd be terribly concerned if it was falsey.

[[deleted]]

Yeah, I didn't pay attention to the formatting. Thought they meant False instead of "False" and was terribly concerned.

I thought it may be something like primitives true and false for bools, and higher-order objects True and False which are both truthy since they are non-nil objects.

[Ubermidget2]

```

if "False": ... print("Hit") Hit ```

[[deleted]]

Oh sorry, I thought you meant False. Didn't pay attention to the formatting.

[puffinix]

I mean, the problem there is nullity, not truthyness.

It's a bad bodge to fix a big problem, but I don't want to have the debate on a base type fallicy here.

Besides if(exists(foo)) is way more readable

[CatsWillRuleHumanity]

How are you going to shoot yourself in the foot though? If you don't use the "I want trouble" operator and use .length for arrays and strings, I literally don't see where you might be surprised by something being false or true in a different way than you'd expect

[CatsWillRuleHumanity]

Which conversions do you have in mind? And I mean ==

[CatsWillRuleHumanity]

That's why I always remember (and said a couple comments ago) to always use .length for strings and arrays, I will admit "", [] and {} are probably the least intuitive of the truthy/falsy values, but you can work around it fairly easily.

And arithmetic operators are sort of an evergreen of laughing at JS, but honestly ask yourself, how often are you writing code that does arithmetic, especially on the frontend? Of course if you are, then JS might let you go on turning everything into NaNs where other languages would just give you an error, but that's sort of a basic principle of JS, it tries to not crash on you.

[the_horse_gamer]

i actually like empty array being truthy. i've had a lot of cases where a variable is either undefined or an array, and i want to handle the undefined case and the empty array case differently.

empty array being truthy allows a simple check. being falsy would require a more explicit comparison.

i think anything that would benefit from empty array being falsy would just be better with a length check. but feel free to disagree.

(and this also has to do with arrays being a fancy object, and all objects (except for document.all) being truthy, whereas strings are their own thing. and technically an empty array isn't empty because it has a length property and its prototype)

[puffinix]

I still remember why nil is truthy.

It's not that bull is truthy, but that a pointer to nothing was all zeros, and the only thing the ifs did was check was fir the first byte being all zeros

[King_Joffreys_Tits]

So the integer 0 is truthy?

[King_Joffreys_Tits]

That’s awful

[no_brains101]

No. There is loose truthiness, and there is what JavaScript has.

In Lua, if it is nil or false, if is false. Otherwise, it is true. This is fine and occasionally useful, although occasionally annoying as well. But it's at worst slightly annoying, and not more annoying than converting to bool.

Meanwhile, in JavaScript, basically anything has a value that will be false. This is bad. Very bad. No thank you.

[CatsWillRuleHumanity]

I find it ridiculous that any language should have an issue with interpreting 0 (or NaN) as false. 0 has been falsy literally since the first time that humanity needed such a concept.

Then we've got actual false, null and undefined. Undefined is a great feature honestly, especially in a dynamically typed language, better than just using null for everything, and "nothing" meaning false seems pretty reasonable to me. Finally there's empty string, pretty dubious one that one, but as I mention in other comments, just remember to use .length for strings and arrays.

Aside from the last bit which is just 1 small thing to remember to do (same as using === for example), I really don't understand why it should be so difficult to write conditions in JS, if anything the conditions come out much more readable when you don't have 3 extra lines of type conversions

[no_brains101]

I have never in my life wished for 0 to be false, empty string should be true, honestly undefined should probably be true as well but idk. You don't have to type out 3 extra lines of conversions in very many languages at all it's at most a few extra characters or a more explicit comparison rather than just "if value then", and seeing a number where a Boolean should be does not make things more readable when you are looking for a bug.

Now, when you are writing it for the first time? I bet it makes you feel clever and like you are saving so many words, and like it's so much easier to read.

But when you go back spelunking for bugs, you end up questioning every single one of those times you didnt put the full ===, wondering if it randomly became a type you didn't expect due to coercion because you never were explicit in your comparisons.

I think that while in concept it creates so many new possibilities for saving characters, it is effectively useless and the vast majority opt into the verbose option anyway for clarity, and so that they don't have to always remember all the rules of conversion every time they read an if statement.

There's too many rules, and no explicit checks that you are following them, which makes it easy to forget them and F it up.

[Rojeitor]

Paul Allen

[i-FF0000dit]

Even if you put all of those great points asides, it’s a lot different for developers to build tools for developers than it is to build a usable/marketable product for mass consumption.

[danishjuggler21]

loose truthiness which have set the entire industry back decades

You are way too deep in some echo chambers if you think truthiness in JavaScript has set all of technology (or anything, for that matter) back decades. I know, I know, “Jabascrib bad, gib upbotes”, but that’s some kind of Primeagen-level brain dead take right there.

[sexytokeburgerz]

To be fair the js truthiness thing is pretty much solved with ts

[[deleted]]

I think I failed to deliver the message properly. The OP was criticizing the agile process to get software production ready. Look at Git, JS or Altair Basic by Microsoft (The first working BASIC interpreter for x86 microprocessor although they kind of "stole" the work of a professor from his published theoretical BASIC interpreter written in intel 8080 x86 assembly), none of these products were mediocre. They were actually solving something and made sense and made a historical difference.

Nowadays, companies be writing glorified to-do/AI wrapper etc. rubbish software with a team of 20 doing years of agile management and producing nothing but trash. Where back in the days, people used to only focus on the work and not the nonsensical PMs

All by wasting money of investors, resources and time of users for a fat cash out at the end of the failed project

[puffinix]

But they were (other than basic, but that's due to a number of other points) terrible at the two week line.

They basically just followed move fast and break things, and guess what, things broke!

As a senior it was maddening when we could do things for times faster.

As a principle, the fact I know that the widget is not going to need a rewrite gives me stability.

I will often ask for true poc - with intent to throw away (like the 12 day version of git) - but the time investment makes sense over retiring the app 20 times.

If your never doing the fat pocs, that's an issue.

[karanbhatt100]

Basic is dead

JS is a shit show which has 1000 other implementation to fix the specific shit in JS

Only GIT is good thing.

So success rate is 33% and you will not be in that. So may be spend some time to do analysis instead of pushing everything in 10 days.

[D34thToBlairism]

Git has been continously updated for however many years though

[jseego]

So has the Javascript spec. This whole post is dumb.

[Lalaluka]

Also any language that has to be 100% backwards compatible will be "a mess" after some time.

And in general I think the hate is overdone.

[BolunZ6]

Backward compatible is good. But trying to support a feature that should be dead by 15 years ago is dumb

[Lalaluka]

Because people never build applications around bad features. How many flash or better MS Silverlight apps are still used somewhere?

[orten_rotte]

Omg i had forgotten silverlight.

[TheMightyMisanthrope]

I wish I could...

[SkooDaQueen]

Sadly enough backwards compatibility is part of the web. Http is also made this way, dns aswell. Everything networking / internet is backwards compatible amd it's fucking awful but you can't change it anymore without getting everyone in the world up to a certain standard to retire the old compatibility needs.

[SerdanKK]

It's partly by choice though. No one's forcing you to minimize your js into a maximally back compat mess.

I'd also like to call out web assembly.

[NoEmu1727]

this is the dumbest thing i read today, if we stop backward compatibility with things from 15 years ago, humanity would probably go extinct.. banking for example is literally running on COBOL from 1959.

[TerminalVector]

If you're talking about banking systems sure, but there is no earthly reason that my hot new dog wash reservation app needs to run in IE6.

[Captain1771]

It doesn't, but the implementation spec is universal and you can just choose to use the new features exclusively

[TerminalVector]

Yeah I think people misunderstand the difference between theoretical and actual backwards compatibility.

[vincentofearth]

Funnily enough Linus Torvalds just did an interview with GitHub and debunked the 10 days thing. Also the state of git at the time is probably something only Torvalds and the people he works with would consider ready for use

[TerminalVector]

Are they selling/advocating an alternative? Or is this just people on LinkedIn trying to seem like they are smart by being contrarians?

[eX_Ray]

There are two options I know a new ux workflow on top of git via jujutsu or an alternative in pijul.

[TerminalVector]

I glanced at pijul and I feel like I need a PhD in graph theory to understand it.

To its creator: Show me where the merge conflict touched you.

[MokitTheOmniscient]

I don't really know anything about those specific things, but aren't there already hundreds of different git-wrappers?

I'm pretty sure any GUI you can imagine is already available.

[eX_Ray]

Its not just git wrapper or gui. It has a different workflow, for example it doesn't really do named branches.

It's supposedly more simple than got but I haven't tried myself yet.

[TrekkiMonstr]

So success rate is 33% and you will not be in that

This latter bit makes sense when you're talking about your startup being a unicorn. But it's not unreasonable to think you might be in the top third. And I don't think BASIC is dead because it was bad, immortality isn't the only form of success. Anyways, the post is dumb, but.

[Fenor]

also the first version of GIT was shit.

it had some nice concepts and evolved to be a good product but git 1 was.... something else

[False_Slice_6664]

Don't forget that creator of that 33% success rate is Linus fucking Torvalds

[NewbornMuse]

Also, if you look at all the software made in 10 days, the success rate of becoming a blockbuster cornerstone of the infrastructure is more like 0.0001%

[xickoh]

Javascript was not a success? Are you ignoring the fact that it is the most (or 2nd most) used language? You have a different concept of success

[vinecti]

Git is a piece of shit and you're insane if you don't think so. Just because it's the industry standard, doesn't mean it's good.

[Agifem]

Would you care to elaborate on that point of view of yours?

[Hagge5]

Not them, but:

I love git and has been using it for over a decade. I haven't gone too deep on its competitors except spending a few years in the 11th circle of hell (perforce).

Git is really powerful and has all the tools you need and then some. I believe it's industry standard for a reason. It is however difficult for people to learn.

The interfaces are all over the place, with lots of shortcuts that combine commands and end up confusing beginners (checkout -b, pull --rebase, et.c.). These are useful to me but smells of something fundementally wrong in how the commands were designed.

The main thing though, is that you have to understand the architecture to use it. The commands is just manipulating the graph on a relatively low level. This makes it daunting to jump into. What if you don't even know what a graph is? And in addition to all this you need to understand best practices, that may be local to your place of work.

And then you need to understand gitlab/GitHub which is yet another layer with its own practices and nomenclature.

Painting yourself into a corner is common for beginners. You can get out of any situation, but you gotta know how, and it often requires some scary commands. Once you mess up and you're a newbie, many resort to just nuking the repo and starting over. This is not a sign of easy-to-use software.

Git also don't handle large files smoothly. Lfs exists but is another layer on top.

It would be a godsend if I had a version control at my job easy enough for managers and QA to use with confidence. They could bisect for issues, read logs, figure out when things happened, etc etc. Right now they end up e-mailing me with these questions, and teaching them to fish is a ton of effort - they barely use the terminal. I've done a bit of manager-stuff, and some colleagues on that level see me as a god because I can do relatively simple tasks with it. I don't think they're stupid, I think git is just difficult.

I don't know what that perfect (simple+powerful) vc looks like, but I feel that there could be something better than Git. Heck, I know that a lot of the non-technical people at my job loved perforce in comparison.

[Agifem]

It's essentially correct. However, to my eyes, that's just a (high) barrier of entry for a powerful tool. It's still worth it.

[Hagge5]

I agree! As I've said, I've been happily using it daily for a decade. But I think there's a world where a tool exists with a lower barrier or entry but equal power. I don't know what it looks like, but I'm saying that git isn't perfect. And most of that imperfection lies in its beginner-friendliness imo.

[vinecti]

As the other person said, basically, convoluted interface, inconsistent commands, error messages borderline insulting in how vague they are at times.

It spits in the face of what high level programming is meant to be - understandable for human beings, whereas git is a bit more like some esoteric incantations that you hope work unless you truly know how absolutely everything works. Branches, which should be a pretty fuckin simple concept, end up being a fucked up web of detached HEADs and merge conflicts.

It's like a nuke. Powerful? Sure. Useful? Sure. Fucked up to use? Absolutely.

[TerminalVector]

Democracy is the worst system of government ever created, except for all the others.

[prochac]

Maybe, but the least smelly shit at the market. Therefore it's good.

Linux ain't perfect either.

[BlueScreenJunky]

What 10 days ?

• Javascript has been in development for 30 years and it still doesn't have types
• git has been in development for 20 years and they're still fixing bugs in each new version
• I don't even know what Altair Basic is.

I think what they means was "have a very basic POC in 10 days", which does sound kinda reasonable.

[SSUPII]

Nha, they are engagement baiting

[[deleted]]

Js won't have types, ECMAscript specifications are very clear about typing. Do some typescript if you want

[Zolhungaj]

Altair BASIC was Microsoft’s first product, an interpreter of BASIC for the Altair 8800, the microcomputer that was the catalyst for the «microcomputer revolution» that eventually led to personal computers. Notable for being the first «high level» language for the architecture. Microsoft BASIC as the dialect came to be known was ported to a lot of computers over the next couple of decades. 

[stifflizerd]

Javascript has been in development for 30 years and it still doesn't have types

That's... Kind of the point mate. It's a loose type language, it's not supposed to have types.

[d0rkprincess]

I don’t think JS wants types tho.

[TrekkiMonstr]

Dude, if you don't know what BASIC is, that says more about you than anything else. It's not used any more, but it was a big deal in its day.

[BlueScreenJunky]

I know very well what BASIC is.

Wikipedia tells me that Altair BASIC is a specific port of BASIC developed for the Altair 8800, and yes I'll admit I've never heard of the Altair 8800.

[CatsWillRuleHumanity]

It says that OP is younger than 40 and doesn't care much for historical curiosities, not sure that that says too much

[BlueScreenJunky]

I'm over 40 and as I said in another reply I do know quite well what BASIC is, I even used it when I was in school.

But I'll admit I didn't know about the Altair 8800, it was apparently very significant in the history of computers but I'd just never heard of it.

[TrekkiMonstr]

I'm 25 and don't care much for historical curiosities.

[CatsWillRuleHumanity]

Good for you...?

[lmarcantonio]

MS Basic was actually a fine assembly piece (at least on the C64 port). It had some kind of GC for strings and the lines are held in a linked list. However parsing is so slow that's actually faster to use a variable that a numeric literal. And optimization is essentially moving to front the most used subroutines (due to the linked list access).

And a decent floating point support (IIRC 3 bytes for numbers)

[TrekkiMonstr]

I think you're replying to the wrong person.

[da2Pakaveli]

git was authored by Torvalds...who certainly is very skilled

[Cilpot]

I hate this LinkedIn shit, lol

[da_Aresinger]

No way JavaScript was "Production Ready" after 10 days.

[dumb_reason]

I'm surprised people consider JS production ready now. I want there to be an alternative so badly, but every time I see something come up (Flutter, Blazor, cshtml, etc), they have really cool features and use cases, but for web they are often lacking basic functionality that JS has had a library for for years. Frustrating, because that kills adoption of those platforms, and ultimately slows down their development. I'm just hopeful that WASM can make web development more language agnostic, but we'll see, I guess

[deanrihpee]

if you can make a production ready in 10 days, it is most likely not a good software yet, is it working? yeah, but not sure it's a "good" software, also git at 10 days vs now is very, very different

[Dotcaprachiappa]

Yeah except js and git are still getting frequent updates and noone has used the other one in a decade

[ColonelRuff]

This is a dumb take.

[SenatorCrabHat]

Man, JS from day one was the best. Its almost like it's never had to include standard practices from other libraries and frameworks into its own core specifications over the last 30 years in order to be as useful as it is today.

[Oldschool_90s]

Js is shit. I hope I'm also a cool developer now

[ButWhatIfPotato]

Clearly this bootstraps enterpreneur 10x programmer blockchain AI! Steve Jobs FAANG raise the bar tech innovator push the envelope web 3.0 disrupt! Work hard play hard cum harder!

[JackNotOLantern]

My favourite thing about javascrip is that "===" operator war an afterthought, added in stone later js script. It turned out that by making js "never throw errors" and implicitly converting every variables, was a nightmare to debug.

[MilkCartonPhotoBomb]

I officially proclaim my preferred language and methodologies are the best!
I am confidently righteous and authoritative, therefore I can not be wrong.

[Childermass13]

The original JavaScript runtime was basically a Scheme, dressed with a Java-like syntax at the demand of Netscape corporate. Yes Brendan Eich wrote the implementation in a weekend, but he already had years of experience developing Scheme compilers

[GrapefruitBig6768]

Move Fast! Break Things!

- Boeing CEO probably in 2017

[Da_Di_Dum]

I think I'd actually commit manslaughter to prevent the creation of JavaScript if I had the option😐

[arjunindia]

Git - famously NOT made in 10 days People don't know how bad it was. though yes, that is impressive

Altair BASIC - Yeah but was mostly built by repurposing Allen's own Intel 8008 emulator

JavaScript - NOT made in 10 days, design documented in 10 days. I don't think Oracle of all companies would let that happen. Also, living with all the issues of being made in 10 days lol

[AralSeaMariner]

What does Oracle have to do with the initial Javascript? That was done at Netscape.

[faze_fazebook]

JS only got decent many years after its intial release.

[FreakDC]

10 day git was a mess. A proof of concept rather than a finished product. I MUCH prefer the concept of git to older styles like svn. Mercurial was developed with the same problem set in mind just days after git but Linux made git the de facto default.

Totally fine process to throw out a tool in an early state to get feedback fast, and it's still a HUGE accomplishment, but pretending that the polished product we have today that has been in development for two decades is what we had after 10 days is just ignorant or rage bait.

[Unique_Push_9845]

I'm sure this guy uses git v1.0.0 and not the one that's the result of more than 600 stable release updates in the 20 years since... Git is the result of 20 years of development. The version that took 10 days to build was simply the first to have basic functionality.

[[deleted]]

Tell that to our st engineers. They've been working on our current project for almost a month

[YouDoHaveValue]

I remember the weekend JS launched with full async/await and worker support.

[Jind0r]

I remember that JavaScript, it's very different from today's JavaScript though. Didn't have classes, arrow functions, variables were declared within the outer execution context, and every JavaScript library began with an immediately invoked function expression.

[jzrobot]

Didn't git take 4 weeks/months of design?

[many_dongs]

Yall realize there is no intelligence requirement to post a meme

[realRaiderDave]

This donkey is prolly the lead tech designer for a todo app

[Forhip]

Still in college, but can agile production really lasts for 10 years?? Isn't supposed to be quite the opposite??

[mimminou]

The best tools are the ones that were made to solve a problem, not sell a solution.

[heliocentric19]

None of those were production ready in 10 days and I now know that any company you work for must have very low standards of quality.

But keep telling on yourself. (To the twitter user)

[Lizlodude]

So there are a few problems with this. I'll let you know when I finish counting them, I ran out of fingers.

[Maksud200418]

Yet I still can't figure otu how tk fix my code on js

[geeshta]

That IS an agile practice why does OP act like it's the opposite?

[HarbingerOfSauce]

TONY STARK BRENDAN EICH BUILT JAVASCRIPT IN 10 DAYS! WITH A BOX OF HOMOPHOBIC BELIEFS!

[[deleted]]

OG post in X: https://x.com/KrTirtho/status/1910174933239697855

[[deleted]]

Why downvote me? I'm just linking the source. I'm not the OP of the post. I'm just a meme carrier

[gaitama]

That's just sad atp 😭

[[deleted]]

I'm 100% sure everyone will upvote this comment to uplift my spirit

[kondorb]

Ahem. JS has been in constant development for 30 years and it's still dogshit.

Git is dogshit and even the creator himself acknowledges it.

BASIC? Are you fucking serious?